Focus Fusion On Google Tech Talks 141
Henning Burdack writes "Eric Lerner talks on Google Tech Talks about Focus Fusion, which would be a much cheaper and more feasible technology as a fusion energy source than any other current approach, based upon the dense plasma focus device. The technology will use hydrogen-boron fusion with direct induction of ion energy and photovoltaic conversion of x-ray emission, obviating the need of a steam-cycle and thus resulting in higher efficiencies. High temperatures of 1 billion Kelvin (100 keV) have been reached years ago. It only needs $2 million in funding and two years of research for a proof of concept, and maybe four more years for a prototype with positive energy output. In contrast to other fusion efforts it utilizes the natural instabilities of plasma instead of fighting them. Focus Fusion has been discussed on Slashdot before, and a patent application is also available, going a bit more into detail."
Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Now here he is introducing a project that requires millions of dollars in funding.
Ok, I'm a bit cynical, but this does look like a possible conflict of interest to me.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Informative)
By itself no, however his wiki entry [wikipedia.org] create strong suspicion of crackpottery:
-graduate without completing a degree
-author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
-denial of quasar as blackholes
-life-long political activist
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW he was banned for reverting libellous material and attempts to imply that things like joining a political organisation make him untrustworthy (well, I suppose he was technically a politician, so maybe he was) and for bigging himself up too persistently - the latter only proves he's a self-righteous arse - so often a problem for scientists.
> author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
No he's not, the cosmology theory is by a nobel prize winning cosmologist. He wrote a book to publicise the theory.
> denial of quasar as blackholes
There is no evidence that they are black holes. They a big and dense. It is not known whether or not they have a large mass behind an event horizon entirely separated from the rest of the universe - we merely have no popular theory to establish that they are not black holes but that doesn't make them so. Assertions that they are and must be black holes and that alternative theories makes you a "DENIER" is far more crackpottish.
> life-long political activist
What does that have to do with his theories on the use of established fundamental quantum limits on bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation for sustaining plasma energy in a DPF plasmoid?
Yes, lets all stop doing science... Damn that science.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Another telltale (Score:2)
Low enough that someone might come up with the amount and a "hey, what if it works?...". If he had asked for $2 billion, the financiers would insist on a very tightly controlled cash management. $2 million is low enough that he might be left controlling the purse strings.
If a proof of concept can be done with $2 million, then he should do first a basic prototype in his hobby shop. After all, people have built Farnsworth fusors [wikipedia.org] for decades, and still no one would claim the
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like if that was bullshit someone would call him on it, rather than invite him over for a Google tech t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No conflict of interest. (Score:1)
It would be a conflict of interest if he were investing in a company developing the technology, while simultaneously sitting as part of a committee deciding whether or not to give funding for such research.
This is just a case of somebody advocating an idea, and advocating the funding of further research. Sure, he may benefit from such funding, but that in itself shows no conflict of interest.
The wiki banning you mention is irrelevant. It's probably just stupid wiki politics
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Elerner [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
which says ( for those who don't RTFA )
Notice: Elerner is banned from editing this article. The user specified has been banned by the Arbitration committee from editing this article indefinitely. The user is not prevented from discussing or proposing changes on this talk page. Posted by Thatcher131 03:01, 3 December 2006 (UTC) for the Arbitration committee. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience.
The bolding is mine.
Gawd!!! I must be bored today. I'm replying to an AC!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Cheap energy on the other hand, is the next best thing to curing cancer & not as many organizations are setup asking for money to research it yet.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
I looked at the talk page for it also, the ban is related to the guideline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Self-promotion [wikipedia.org]
Here are the findings of fact,
"Eric Lerner
7) Elerner (talk contribs deleted contribs logs block user block log) is Eric Lerner, an advocate of th
Ok, but (Score:2)
Personally, I am starting to think that he is getting a bit of a bum rap on this. It makes me wonder what is true on wiki. While I like that wiki is taking time to check things, perhaps, it is time for wiki to have subject matter experts do the rev
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Should have come to Colorado. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That said, the science sounds mildly promising, and I don't get the impression he's a scammer -- I think he genuinely believes in a fusion method that may have promise, but is probably a dead end. And I think trying it out just to be sure is probably not an awful idea. The fact that he got himself banned from Wikipedia means he is dangerously close t
Only 6 years away. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. Unfortunately Dr Bussard has passed away recently. However the project has funding again, and
apparently they are builing a new prototype, WB7.
There's a discussion site at http://www.talk-polywell.org/ [talk-polywell.org] .
Mike.
Another Company... (Score:2)
Google for "Tri-Alpha Energy"
Re:Another Company... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO anyone interested in investing in this guy who is not a university or reserch institute should be extremely careful. Like put a radio ankle bracelet on him careful.
So far not so crazy (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about this guy's background, but so far (still watching) he hasn't said anything crazy that signifies obvious crack-pottery. There's been o zero-point energy nonsense, and he's using standard terminology to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone with a little background in the subject. The new bit seems to be clever use of plasma instability to get the energy density required to initiate fusion. I'm not a plasma physicist (just particle physics), so I can't critically evaluate the details of the method. So far I'd believe this is plausible, but I don't know enough to be willing to give this guy any money.
And for gosh-sakes, fix the article summary. keV = kilo electron volts, not Kelvin!
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
- Actual experiments at various scales
- Multiple institutions testing these ideas (I don't mean the 3 companies he lists at the beginning, but rather the various researchers working on dense plasma focusing.)
- Acknowledgment of challenges, and explanation of how they were overcome.
That still doesn't say whether it's a practical power source, but at least he is starting with reasonable science.Re: (Score:2)
However the percentage of nice people vs egregiously annoying people among good scientists probably correlates well with the population at large, so it's important to discriminate
So many ACs (Score:3, Funny)
Is that you, Eric?
More of a research device (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, this guy is probably guilty of exactly what he accuses the rest of the fusion community of - he's fixated on his idea. He apparently won funding from the navy [slashdot.org], so there's a chance his group could prove me wrong, and I hope that they do, but I doubt it.
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Informative)
Pretending that this is a non issue without backing up with some calculations/data is bad science. Especially when there is quite a lot of analysis indicating that at best they get around 3-5% of the power out as they put in (real devices less than 0.001% or worse). Thus without some high efficiency (>>90%) power recirculation method they can't work as a power production device.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Interesting)
And Bussard had responded directly to that issue:
Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion cross-section is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and "cold") anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14).
In layman's terms, the Polywell design fuses ions faster than they maxwellianize, thanks to the ratio of time in core to time in edge. The full high level paper from Bussard can be found here [askmar.com].
You only need to maintain the non-maxwellian distribution long enough for the ions to fuse before they maxwellianize. Thermalization in the outer edge dominates the coulomb interactions from the core more than the collisions dominate the fusion rates. Those are the conditions that allow fusion to occur faster than maxwellianization. No magic, no violation of physics, just a beneficial design that Rider and Nevins both overlooked in their assumptions.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT [mit.edu] and University of Wisconsin-Madison [wisc.edu].
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway I have read all the stuff I could find on his device and other ES confinment devices. I think the paper you want to ref is:
"The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion", Bussard, Robert W.,57th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2006).
This and all other "publications" of his do not explain anything. They just assert that some fact is correct, often in the face of other facts. No math, no explanation on other experiments, no justifications at all. Example in the above he claims the following: "giving DD fusions at over 100,000x higher output (at 1E9 fus/sec) than all prior similar work at comparable drive conditions (Ref. 3)." yet normal commercial neutron source fusors get 1e9 events per second wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and 1e8 are achieved at lower voltages and don't need high B fields, and also where are the error bars? Then there are scaling laws which are simply not backed up. In fact with everything I have read it appears that its made up.
And for the ions to fuse faster than they thermalise would require some black magic in terms of plasma density and thermodynamics and charge distributions, or he thought everyones data on fusion reaction cross sections is completely wrong (and thats arguing against a lot of experimental data from a lot of different places). And I'm assuming D T reactions. P B are 1000's of times worse.
You can't do physics without some theroy to back you up. You can't answer critics that use theroy that has shown to be a good model in similar situations without justifying why the model is not good in your case. Bussards work does not have or do that. Plain and simple.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Electrostatic fusion is viewed as a black horse, but if you have a good paper on it, it will get published. We want to believe that it can be done. But you must back up your position and at least address known issues with proper exploration of the appropriate models. Just claiming your right and they are wrong is not science.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your lying, here's why:
yet normal commercial neutron source fusors get 1e9 events per second wikipedia and 1e8 are achieved at lower voltages and don't need high B fields
And then you link to a wiki article on FISSION neutron sources. Sure they don't require any voltages be input, but they aren't DD fusion based either now are they? Bussard was extremely familiar with fusion research and
Re: (Score:2)
Commercial fusor devices can generate on the order of 109 neutrons per second
whos not reading the links?
As for the other comments. Where is the math? The charge density in the core can't be significantly far from equilibrium. There are a lot of electrons in there. Just saying they will fuse faster. Based on WHAT, oh yea a reference to his own paper that again just writes down a formula and asserts its correctness in this case. Other people in the field who have done the same math come up with a no go answer. If his math is correct we would get much larger
Re: (Score:2)
whos not reading the links?
And Bussard's claim:
These four definitive tests showed true Polywell potential well trapping of ions at ca. 10 kV well depth (with a 12.5 kV drive), with total DD fusion neutron output of ca. 2E5 nts over a period of about 0.4 msec; giving an average fusion rate of about 1E9 fus/sec - over 100,000 times higher than the results achieved by Farnsworth/Hirsch for DD at such low energies, and 100x higher
Re: (Score:2)
But i went through other posts of yours. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. What is your academic background? Do you even have one?
I already know that you won't listen. Dam enough folk have said the same thing
Re: (Score:2)
You can't change the laws of physics. Its the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Anything not in equilibrium (in this case Maxwellian velocity distribution) then is relaxes to this state.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. What is your academic background?
I'm just a comp sci grad with a physics minor. If it's as fundamental as the 2nd law of thermodynamics then help me by pointing out what I'm missing.
Take 1 ion and introduce it at a given electric potential, it just orbits in and out between ~
Re: (Score:2)
This is obviously nonsense. A single of-centre collision in the core is enough to give the ions involved dramatically different energies ( and keep in mind, you will have D-D and T-T side collisions as well , or B-B and p-p in the case of p-B fusion ), and they will thus obviously end up at different potential heights. Are you suggesting they would th
Re: (Score:2)
A single of-centre collision in the core is enough to give the ions involved dramatically different energies ( and keep in mind, you will have D-D and T-T side collisions as well , or B-B and p-p in the case of p-B fusion ), and they will thus obviously end up at different potential heights. Are you suggesting they would then "thermalize" so that they all end up on the same potential height?
No, they won't all end up at the same potential height. Just enough to overcome the collision/fusion cross section rat
Re: (Score:2)
The fact of the matter is, while Bussard touted orders of magnitude higher neutron output than other IEC devices, the absolute neutron production rate wasn't very high compared to other, existing fusion sources.
I'm just a stickler for details like "comparable drive energies". It is dishonest to claim results at 13kV driv
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent down. Ions do not collide with electrons, they collide with each other! This is worse than the article calling KeV(Kilo electron Volts) degrees Kelvin. When spouting off about bad science and such, don't mod up posts getting particle physics 101 stuf
Re: (Score:2)
Its a well known fact that energy loss in high temperature plasmas is from ion electron collisions. I have no references to KeV anywhere and yes you do measure temperature in eV and KeV in plasma physics regularly. Just google it for gods sakes. Oh and I teach physics well above a 101 level.
Please have a nice hot cup of shut the hell up.
Re: (Score:2)
What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding.
I've watched the video once and skipped through a second time now...I don't see where you got this from. Can you provide a time reference?
Also, as far as crack-pottery goes, is there anything statement from him that isn't true, or grounded in real science? In the comments here today I see a few "...sounds fishy to me..." type statements but no one points to anything
Re: (Score:2)
For the crackpot-esque funding claims, just look for his claims about the DOE "defending their rice bowl." If you had any idea how the funding process works you'd know that the decisions of who to give a grant to aren't directed primarily by a bunch of territorial bureaucrats, it's made by scientists, his fellow peers who would actually be able to measure the merits of what he is proposing better than anyone. Fra
Re: (Score:2)
The "defending their rice bowl" comment and the Navy funding was Bussard, but the comments about "he", "him" and "his" don't indicate that the comments are about anybody but the topic of the slashdot article - ie, Lerner.
Bussard (Score:2)
Lerner doesn't go into as great a detail about the DOE denying funding as Bussard, but he does definitely accuse them of only being interested in few huge projects.
So, basically, the same criticism applies to Bussard and Lerner with the same punch-line: I really hope they're right, but I really doubt it.
on lack of funding (Score:2)
In both Bussard and Lerner's talks, it does come off as a bit crack-potish when they complain about lack of funding. However, in both cases, if I remember correctly, they had military funding and that funding was cut due to the Iraq war. That isn't a conspiracy, it's consistent with my understanding of the current funding climate. The military just doesn't have the money to fight a war and do basic research on things that aren't going to be in immediately deployable products.
I'm not sure if their claim
Re: (Score:2)
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Of course fifty years ago we didn't know about the time cube so it's no wonder it didn't work...
(haven't read TFA, so don't really have an opinion on focus fusion anyway)
Good comprehensive video... (Score:4, Interesting)
In a proper and decent world, men like Robert Bussard would be heroes to our children, and household names that have high schools named after them... his concept of a fusion ramjet, the Bussard Ramjet, from Known Space and other places... is still the only realistically viable idea for intersteller travel...
IANANP... would love someone who is to break this video and it's ideas down... would it work?
peace
Re:Good comprehensive video... (Score:5, Informative)
Briefly there are two problems:
1. ordinary hydrogen is very hard to fuse. Even at the centre of the sun the average proton takes about 10^10 years to fuse.
Since the comrpressed interstellar gas is streaming through your ship at roughly lightspeed, even if "pinch" in your magnetic fields is 1km long, you have to get a decent proportion of it to fuse in 3 microseconds, so you need to achieve, in your pinch, temperature and density far far higher than at the centre of the sun. This seems difficult at best.
2. the interstellar medium (we now know) is best thought of as more like a froth than a uniform gas. Supernova shocks and other upsets clear "bubbles" and after a while almost all the gas ends up packed into relatively thin "bubble walls". Incoveniently, the Sun is sitting in the middle of a bubble several light-years across, so the interstellar gas is a very very thin round here.
Steve
Re: (Score:2)
Also, the most impressive result from the polywells was the last one and was not discovered until they had dis-mantled the machine. I want a repeata
Re: (Score:2)
Farnsworth was a researcher who knew vacuum tube electronics better than nearly any other en
I Can See It Already. (Score:1, Offtopic)
I am not a physicist, but does anyone other than myself see the next "Perpetual Motion Machine" coming to rise? If $2M isn't enough to buy even the cheapest of power supply plants, then I highly doubt that you can build yourself a plasma-generating machine on that money alone.
Hell, if that were possible, it would have definintely been done already. Some executives in this world can shake that much pocket change out of their pants. Daily.
Ah yes; Amazing is it not (Score:2)
Yes, when ppl and companies come along claiming to do something at a fraction of the price, you KNOW they must be fleecing. BTW,
word to the wise (Score:3, Insightful)
One factor of many: plasmas are prone to a host of instabilities, and 'stability' usually involves tradeoffs between one type of instability and another. So when somebody tells you "my plasma is stable", it should set off warning bells. The honest man will tell you the limits of stability.
As Artsimovich put it so eloquently in 1961, "Initial belief that the doors to the desired region would open smoothly at the first powerful pressure exerted by the creative energy of physicists has proved as unfounded as the sinner's hope of entering Paradise without passing through Purgatory. We do not know how long we will be in Purgatory."
We got into the Space Age by way of the Cold War, but what will push us into the Fusion Age?
Re: (Score:1)
Peak oil?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Energy research will be stuck with the cripplingly impractical until environmental activists drop their lifestyle agendas.
Elementry (Score:1, Offtopic)
Here we go again. (Score:5, Informative)
Now, the issue with fusion using fuels with higher atomic number than hydrogen is that the plasma will contain much more electrons, and this dramatically increases the amount of energy lost as bremsstrahlung when the electrons collide with the nuclei (the increased mass of the nuclei also plays a part ). Direct conversion of X-rays could theoretically help alleviate this as it would allow you to feed the lost energy back into the plasma, problem is, photo-voltaics have nowhere close to 100% efficiency.
Aneutronic fusion has advantages. You don't have to worry about neutron damage to the reactor vessel. However, when you look a bit closer at it, this isn't such a large advantage after all, because the neutrons are actually quite useful in that they deposit the energy over a quite large volume when they are being absorbed, reducing the stress caused by heating in the device. If it wasn't for the neutrons you would see most of the heat deposited in a comparably thin layer of the plasma-facing compounds. The counter for this is that aneutronic fusion releases the energy as charged particles, potentially allowing for directly converting the energy into electricity.
Basically, what this whole thing boils down to, is if you are able to achieve sufficiently good direct-conversion efficiency to counteract the increased X-ray losses due to the higher atomic numbers associated with aneutronic fusion. This is why you often see claims of breakthroughs in aneutronic fusion together with claims of either a non-maxwellian velocity distribution or some other remarkable way to reduce X-ray losses. A plasma with a maxwellian velocity distribution cannot sustain aneutronic fusion without being either very large and dense (to re-capture the X-rays) or by somehow capturing the lost X-rays after they leave the plasma and feeding the energy back into it.
For a non-maxwellian velocity distribution your problem is that even at optimal energies a collision is much more likely to scatter the ions than it is to cause fusion, and restoring the non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require energy (no, you don't get to violate the second law of thermodynamics I'm afraid ). For capturing X-rays your problem is to achieve a good enough conversion efficiency to make up for the dramatically increased X-ray losses.
With the exception of a few unconfirmed claims, nobody has been able to resolve the above problems (thou Bussard was quite vocal about his polywell device ) and this is pretty much why modern fusion power research uses D-T fusion. It gives the highest amount of energy for the lowest temperature and X-ray losses, at a maxwellian velocity distribution.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not true. My above post highlighted problems with using high Z number ions because the large quantity of electrons, and relatively low fusion energy gain, makes it difficult to overcome the energy losses. For D-T fusion however ( and possibly D-D fusion ) , the fusion energy is both every high, and can occur at ( relatively speaking ) lower temperatures. As
The tritium economy (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this a legitimat
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When it comes to tritium, you could generate the small startup amount using a fission reactor. Once you have a small quantity of tritium the reactor could breed the res
Re: (Score:2)
ITER is going to have Q=10 when they haven't even got Q=1, an order of magnitude improvement. The only thing ITER is going to do is allow the current crop of fusion experts to retire in comfort. The one thing that signals to me that ITER is flawed is that they are working on sub-systems without having proved the main idea. Wasting money on engineering when research is still
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, my bad. I was confusing it with JT-60 which achieved D-D parameters corresponding to Q=1.25 had D-T fuel been used ( Tritium is radioactive and hence most devices use D-D for testing as the cost of tritium handling facilities can be quite large ).
Pretty much. The increase is
Re: (Score:2)
With regards to ITER doing engineering before research, why did they not pay to run JT-60 on D-T at Q > 1. This would have been a huge breakthrough and solidified support, not to mention generated huge result sets to infer from. But instead they left that undone and pressed ahead with their own tests that are not
Re: (Score:2)
Tritium handling is not easy. When they did DT at JET, they spent 10 years developing the tritium system (see chapter 14 of "The Science of JET" by John Wesson, available online). Also, running DT results in nuclear activation of the structure, so a robotic remote handling system needs to be in place. It may not have been feasible to run DT at JT-60 for these and other reasons.
One idea they seem to h
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For a non-maxwellian velocity distribution your problem is that even at optimal energies a collision is much more likely to scatter the ions than it is to cause fusion, and restoring the non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require energy (no, you don't get to violate the second law of thermodynamics I'm afraid ). For capturing X-rays your problem is to achieve a good enough conversion efficiency to make up for the dramatically increased X-ray losses.
With the exception of a few unconfirmed claims, nobo
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He assumed that they would return to different potential heights, but that thermalization would return them to a maxwellian potential energy distribution.
In reality, fusion can only occur through high
A cluster (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like a Ford product (Score:3, Funny)
exploding batteries (Score:2)
Prototype Images online ... (Score:2)
(It would a lot funnier without this: [safercar.gov])
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The idea behind Polywell is to magnetically concentrate electrons at the center of a spherical vacuum chamber, so they can attract positively charged fuel ions that will fuse at the center.
Focus Fusion also uses electric charges to create fusion butm (IIUC) the fusion supposedly takes place in zones called plasmids - tiny unstable regions of plasma.
Focus Fusion == crack the whip (Score:2)
Big Science effect (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea whether there's any chance focus fusion could work. But I do believe it has probably been a terrible mistake to have put all our eggs in the tokamak basket for all these years. When you don't know how to solve a problem, it's critical to keep exploring alternative approaches, especially if they're radically different. I would love to see substantially more funding for focus fusion, electrostatic confinement fusion, sonofusion, and even good old Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion. The total would still be small compared to tokamak funding -- and who knows, maybe one of them would work out, or maybe we would learn something that turned out to be useful in the tokamak.
While there certainly are crackpots out there, I think we're too quick to dismiss ideas outside the mainstream, too eager to congratulate ourselves for knowing the truth already when we clearly don't know all of it. We need to cultivate more humility in the face of the mystery of the unknown.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(It's true that we've made ITER DOE's number one priority
Exactly why this wont work. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
It will be very interesting if they can get the WB 7 going. It seems as though there were two huge issues with the W
URL correction (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the website (I'm no longer associated with it) referenced in that article is not in good shape, and that link is now dead.
The identical story, which was composed by myself, was also published at PESN [pesn.com].
Whoever has the necessary access might want to update the link at Slashdot.
I might point out that the Slashdot community gernally belittled to story. I take some satisfaction in seeing tha
Interesting, but a contradiction? (Score:2)
Later in the talk, he mentioned that x-ray cooling could be limited by raising the magnetic field to around 6 gigagauss. Isn't that a contradiction?
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
If it's that rare, wouldn't it have been overkill to use twenty-mule teams to haul borax out of the desert?
Without bothering to look it up, it seems like global consumption of a fusion fuel wouldn't be more than a couple of thousand tons per year. Boron compounds are a commodity that's currently consumed on the scale of a million tons per year.
Re: (Score:2)
Tritium is extremely easy to manufacture, but with a half life of ~12 years it's not something you generally store. It's easy to make as you need it though, usually by bombarding Lithium-6 or Boron-10 with neutrons.
=Smidge=